Number of the Month

August 2002

Dog Watch

Can it really be that Number Watch has been around
long enough to enter its third silly season? The Romans called these the Dog
Days, caniculares dies, when Sirius, the Dog Star, was high in the
heavens. Being the brightest star in the sky, it was thought to add to the
sun’s radiation, causing plague and pestilence – an early version of the
global warming scare. We can look back with fond memories to the first of our
silly season scares Panic in the Streets. That
led to the great disposable surgical instrument campaign, which was only
abandoned this May, and £25 million later.

Also two years ago we covered Britain’s burgeoning crime
figures and the fact that the noble Lord Birt, to whom we raise our hats, had
been put in charge; and what a success he has been. Crime, especially violent
street crime, has seen a startling rise in productivity and it fills the
headlines of newspapers. In the now traditional sign of panic, the Great Leader
has taken personal charge and promised a reduction by September. Like other MPs,
though, he is off on his hols trying to spend some of those vast salary
increases. Only a month to go, Tone! Watch out for some spectacular statistical
juggling.

Blind spot

We all have our little bouts of naiveté. Your bending
author thought for many years that in a double blind trial the key was put away,
like a parcel under the Christmas tree, and only opened when the witching hour
arrived. This illusion was shattered when the great tamoxifen fiasco was
revealed. Apparently there is some overseeing spirit that descends, deus ex
machina, to intervene and terminate the trial when the time is right.

It is all a bit like those Chinese walls they are supposed
to have in merchant banks and finance houses. People working on one floor never
speak about their work to people on another floor, even though they meet up
after hours in the wine bars and lap-dancing clubs, but never, of course,
indulge in boastful or helpful behaviour (Nudge, nudge; wink, wink; say no more,
say no more). That is why insider trading never happens.

So, mea culpa, impure thoughts entered this nasty
old cynic’s head when the great HRT trial termination hit the headlines.
Furthermore, while confessionals are in order, is it possible, if HRT is even
half what it is cracked up to be, that the patients and their doctors did not
know whether they were on the real stuff or the placebos? Of course, if the
trial had produced a decisive result, such inappropriate ideas would not have
surfaced.

It is, of course, a total aberration to have such mistrust
in one’s betters. It would imply that their concerns are more about funding
than the well-being of humankind. The only possible recourse is a course of
counselling. Unfortunately, such facilities are rather rare in rural Wiltshire,
and California is a long way away (Oh dear! Another impure thought, almost wrote
“Thank God”).

Incidentally, while on the subject of the HRT scam, reader
Steve Dillon discovered a whole new method of scare amplification in the Washington
Post, they simply make the risk cumulative.

Each year 30 out of 10,000 postmenopausal women taking no
therapy fall ill to heart disease. For every year women took HRT, they increased
their risk of heart disease by seven per 10,000. This means that for every
10,000 women taking HRT, 37 could expect to fall ill to heart disease the
first year, 44 the next year, 51 the following year, and so forth. While the
absolute risks are small, the increases were viewed as significant, and
women's heart risks escalated the longer they stayed on the drugs.

Obituary

Sir Benjamin Smythe

One of Britain’s great polymaths has been tragically
taken from us at the early age of 67. Poet, mathematician, entrepreneur,
academic and administrator, Sir Benjamin was the epitome of the old saw
“Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”

Few would have seen the mark of greatness in the young
Benny Smith as he was then, but his entrepreneurial spirit was evident when the
thirteen year old was regularly seen out with his bucket, collecting the residue
from passing horse-drawn vehicles, which were then still common on the streets
of the capital. He used to sell the produce at a penny a load to keen gardeners,
and was thus able to build up capital to start his first business, operating
from mobile premises in London’s Middlesex Street.

Much of his early poetry has been lost to posterity, as it
was published in the form of murals in various small rooms about the capital,
but who can forget the poignant concision of those few works that have been
preserved; such as the familiar couplet:

What is life if, lacking wit,
We have no time to sit and shit?

Pithy sayings were to become the trademark of his
distinguished later career.

For an autodidact, his calculating powers were legendary
and he could compute complex probabilities in his head from an early age. He was
avidly sought as a consultant by small business men operating in and around the
dog and horse racing tracks of North London.

There are unfortunate lacunae in the record of his career,
when he seems to have disappeared from the scene for months or years on end, but
admirers believe that it was during these mysterious periods of retreat that he
developed his philosophy of business and life. One of his many business slogans
at this time was “Quick in the head, quick on the feet.”

It was a surprise to everyone who knew him when he
disappeared from London and turned up in rural Hampshire. It was at about this
time that he developed his life-long interest in climate change, for he used to
say that London simply got too hot for him. His transition to one of the great
innovative spirits of academia occurred at this time, almost by accident. With
typical generosity of spirit, he forgave an elderly woman a gambling debt and in
lieu took over control of the Lillian Forsdyke School of Music, Dance and Drama,
which was a well-known academy for young ladies operating from a barn in Over
Wallop. His characteristic loyalty came to the fore when he sent for some of his
old London colleagues to come and form what he liked to call his “negotiating
team”. They
were uniquely persuasive and became familiar and striking figures around the
villages of North Hampshire, with their inevitable dark suits and dark glasses.
One by one, local small educational and other establishments rushed to join the
growing educational enterprise; and wise they were too, for many of them were to
be the seeds that would grow into full-blown faculties. Miss Hale’s Afternoon
Nursery Class of Kings Somborne formed the basis of a Faculty of Education.
Joe’s Corner Garage of Houghton was to grow into the Faculty of Engineering.
Even Fred’s Caff on the A30 just outside Stockbridge was the larva from which
an imago, the Faculty of Advanced Chemistry, was to emerge.

It was about this time that he became a leading light in
the campaign to end elitism in higher education. He was especially critical of
the university establishment, whom he described in his typical down-to-earth
language as “them stuck-up college tarts.” His sentiments found an echo in
the policies of the new Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, which were to
tear down the class barriers in higher education. Thus it was in the mid
nineties that his creation, by then known as the Nether Wallop Combined
Colleges, was at last able to offer degrees ratified by Thames University. He
was not, however, a political zealot, and it has since emerged that over
subsequent years he donated several million pounds to the New Labour project.

It is now common knowledge that he found himself the first
Vice Chancellor of the Metropolitan University of Nether Wallop, which offered a
variety of new degrees with the emphasis on relevance to the community. He also
received a knighthood in the first year of the New Labour government.
“Surprised?” he would jest, “I nearly bought my own beer!”

He remained famous for his pithy three-word slogans. The
new Research Block, set up in a disused hangar on the Middle Wallop airfield,
sported the slogan “Scares mean grants!” He always claimed that his old mate
Greg Dyke, of New Labour BBC, stole from him one of his best creations, which
was “Cut the crap!”

He was characteristically modest about his achievements.
“I am still in the same business I was at the age of thirteen”, he would
tell the congregation at the lavish degree ceremonies, for which only a small
minority of parents would decline to pay the fee.

It was at the recent degree ceremony (tickets £50, bring
your own picnic) held in the Middle Wallop Community Hall that the Chancellor of
the University, Baroness Euthanasia Gimbal, paid a final glowing tribute to Sir
Benjamin – “If there was one man who summed up what modern education is all
about it was Ben. His watchword was “Access”. He did not see why young
people carrying a minor disability, such as being unable to write their own
name, should be deprived of higher education, provided, of course, that they had
the money or credit worthiness to meet the fees. He took a particular interest
in the progress of young women. As he used to say ‘While I strive to maintain
the Faculty, I still have a keen interest in the student body.’

He was totally dedicated to his work and always said it was
his ultimate ambition to die on the job. His close friend, eighteen year old
Melanie Topley, one of his many youthful protégées, confirmed that he achieved
his ambition.

And so, along with thousands of graduates around the world
(with their innovative degrees in such vital subjects as billiard table studies,
corn dolly engineering and media studies), we bid a reluctant farewell to one of
the great pioneers of education. And future generations will sing his praises,
when they are saved from roasting in the hell of global warming by the work of
his inspirational creation, The Phlogiston Research Unit. And, always
remembering to begin our sentences with a conjunction and to inevitably split
our infinitives, we salute a man who, more than anyone, represented the spirit
of the age.

Flavour of The Times

August
1st, St Silliers Day, and The Times celebrated it in style.
Naturally, anti-tobacco propaganda made the front page:

Passive
smoking can kill your catBy Alan Hamilton and Laura Peek

IF
YOU won’t give up smoking for the sake of the wife and kids, then at least
give it up for the cat.

American researchers claim
to have discovered that passive smoking affects felines as much as it does human
beings, and have expressed the hope that endangering the family pet might shame
some addicts, immune to the effect they are having on their immediate family,
into kicking the habit.

Scientists studied 180 cats
treated at a Tufts veterinary hospital between 1993 and 2000. They found that,
adjusting for age and other factors, cats exposed to second-hand smoke had more
than double the risk of acquiring the disease. In households where they were
exposed to smoke for five years or more, cats tripled their risk.

How does it take two journalists to write guff like
this and then get the numbers wrong? The Trojan Number was actually 194
cats, 80 with lymphoma and 114 controls with renal disease. From this small
sample of 80, the “researchers” not only proved that tobacco smoke may
cause lymphoma in cats but established a linear trend. Warning: children,
do not try this at home; only qualified epidemiologists can perform this feat.
It has all the hallmarks of classical epidemiology; anecdotal evidence, wide 95%
confidence intervals (1.2 to 4.5) adjustments for age and "other
factors", no believable mechanism in terms of concentrations of any
possible agents. In a word, Junk. How about an alternative headline: Passive
smoking reduces renal disease in cats.

Also on page one

Customs
anger at 'charter for smugglers'By Andrew Norfolk

HM
CUSTOMS & Excise faces a deluge of compensation claims after a court ripped
to shreds its “zero tolerance” approach to the seizure of tobacco and
alcohol from continental day-trippers.

In a ruling that was
immediately attacked as a smugglers’ charter, the High Court found that
Customs had breached a European directive protecting the free movement of goods
between EU nations.

The judgment means that
Customs officers will no longer be able to carry out random searches of vehicles
arriving in Britain from the Continent. They will be allowed to stop vehicles
only if they have specific intelligence that its occupants may be bootleggers.

In a further blow to the
crackdown on smuggling that cost the Treasury £3.5 billion in lost revenue from
tobacco alone last year, the ruling reverses the burden of proof over those
found with large quantities of cigarettes and alcohol. The Treasury said that it
may appeal.

Number Watch warned a year
and a half ago to remember the date (see Red
letter day). That was when the activities of the Government and its minions
began to ignore the law and make illegal seizures of legally bought goods and
even the cars of innocent citizens. It has taken all this time for a judge to
declare the obvious.

Give The Times its due; it included a powerful first
leader, including this paragraph:

The use of random stops by
uniformed officials operating without good grounds for reasonably suspecting an
offence is an all too prevalent sin, whether it is the Camberwell policeman
taking against a youth on prejudice, the Camberley officer applying the
breathalyser on whim to satisfy targets, or the customs official pulling over a
family estate to rifle through the boxes of Gauloises. The courts do every
citizen a service when they remind officialdom that there should be a strong
presumption in favour of the private individual’s free movement.

The nation is under the heel of authoritarian socialism,
with the upper house emasculated, the courts are the last hope of the free-born
Briton, but ministers now have their eye on them as well. Meanwhile, the Leader
of the Opposition, Dunkin Donut, is too busy celebrating his new pink and fluffy
party to bother with actual policy matters. He recently demoted David Davis from
Party Chairman for lack of enthusiasm about same. This is significant from the
point of view of Number Watch, as Davis is the only senior politician
with the faintest idea of what science is about. His new job is shadowing Old
Two Jags, who is busy doing his bit for state control by sweeping away the
planning process, and is to science what Dracula is to the blood transfusion
service. It might be an interesting confrontation.

On page 2 we have: Fury
as ministers dismiss doubts over media bill. To New Labour the media are
just a commodity, and anyway they have put in yet another of their cronies to
oversee it. The bill will allow foreign companies to take over the British media
without any reciprocal rights being granted. Over to you Rupert.

On the same pageFarmers
plan day of protest against movement ban. As a little left-over from the
Foot and Mouth fiasco, the government has kept in place regulations which will
force even more farms out of business.

The whole of page 3 is
devoted to the booze cruises, by which Britons can celebrate their newly
confirmed rights (but for how long?) to buy legal goods in the rest of the EU
and bring them home.

On page 4Court
backs London toll charge. Ken Livingstone, once left wing fire brand and now
Mayor of London, has won legal backing to reserve the streets of London for the
rich, the corporate, the bureaucratic and the governmental. Also People’s panel blast
public service reform. A panel of voters, set up by New Labour, is being
disbanded. Wonder why? In a parting shot it produced numbers showing that
satisfaction with the police, fire service, council housing and hospitals had
all fallen drastically. The Government pointed out that there was more
satisfaction with the Passport Agency, museums and art galleries, so that’s
all right.

On page 6 Correspondence
is closed, declare reclusive MPs. Yes, they are all off on their freebie
“research” trips to such data-rich places as the sun-kissed island of
Mauritius. They are also cutting off their e-mails, because it is so
inconvenient to have to spend time dealing with the concerns of the people who
pay their recently grossly inflated wages.

On page 7Parents
pay to cover risk of student drop-outs. Students are dropping out in record
numbers because of disappointment in tacky courses or their own unsuitability to
be in higher education. Insurance companies are jumping onto a new bandwagon.
Plenty of scope for yet another insurance disaster there.

On page 9 an appalling storyScience body had ‘blinkered view of race’. A parliamentary committee
has criticised The Royal Society for not knowing how many of its fellows come
from different racial groups, though it was ‘cleared’ of being prejudiced
against women. Why should they inquire into the racial background of their
fellows? The Society now must face the penalty for accepting public funding and
have a politically correct policy enforced which has nothing to do with the
merit that Fellowship traditionally confers.

Here’s a good one on page 10:

Now, you might think it pretty obvious that people with the
most severe asthma, and therefore most at risk of death, would be the one’s
most likely to take large doses of the relieving inhalers. Not a bit of it, you
have got it completely the wrong way round.

Asthma
relieving drug has death riskBy Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor

Yes
it’s our old friend Nigel again. A nice big Trojan Number, but it seems to
shrink somewhat as we go on. Your bending author tried to reconcile the two
numbers highlighted in red, but gave up.

DRUGS
that relieve the symptoms of asthma are linked to a higher risk of dying than
those that control the disease itself, a new study has shown.

Using the details of 96,000
asthma sufferers on the anonymous General Practice database in Britain,
researchers compared the outcomes of using the short-term “reliever” drugs
with those of using long-term inhaled steroids. The study, published in Thorax,
confirms the wisdom of modern practice, which is to prescribe the two
medications together.

Between
1994 and 1998, there were 43
deaths that could be attributed unambiguously to asthma. Patients who had
between seven and 12 prescriptions of the short acting drugs in a year were 16
times more likely to die, while those with more than 13 prescriptions were 86
times more likely. However, the risks were reduced by 60 per cent when patients
were also given inhaled steroids.

I am grateful to your editor for giving me this opportunity
to comment on one or two current news items. He thought that this was an
appropriate season to invite such a senior academic to do so, no doubt because
universities are in the news at the height of the recruitment season. He is
taking a well-earned short retreat in a well-known establishment with
comfortably padded rooms and no extraneous views to interfere with one’s
meditations.

As a University man I was most struck by the piece in the Sunday
Times (August 4th) Crisis as student numbers plummet. It
appears that recruitment numbers have fallen in twenty-seven institutions, all
but one new universities. Frankly, they only have themselves to blame. In this
modern industry it is absolutely necessary to get right three things – product
design, product placement and product promotion. At MUNW we have done this and
three of our most successful courses are over-subscribed (BA in Journalism with
Origami, BSc in Epidemiology with Necromancy and the MSc in Media Studies with
Air Miles). As soon as candidates apply, they receive a personal visit from
members of our negotiating team and usually find they receive an offer they
cannot refuse. They even have their finance sorted out on the spot, through our
special arrangement with the Squaloid Loan Company.

On the same page I see that Police fail to meet 75% of
crime targets. They should be ashamed of themselves! What is the point of
our paying for some of the best brains in the country to sit in offices in
Whitehall thinking up targets, if people at the workface are just going to
ignore them? At MUNW we have a special Government Targets Office, whose word is
law across the campus. Even if everything else grinds to a halt, we always meet
our targets, which is why we are in such good standing with those we serve.

It is good to see that our officials (and, of course, our
excellent media) are not letting up on the dire threat of climate change. The
Times thought the latest story so important that they published it twice;
first by their political correspondent, David Chater, Warmer winters will
save on hospital admissions (August 2nd) and the next day Climate
Change Health Warning by their environmental editor, Anthony Browne.
Naturally, the latter got the emphasis right, concentrating on floods,
heat-related deaths, food poisoning and, of course, Malaria. It all came from a
report by a group of our excellent officials at the Department of Health. The
Phlogiston Research Unit (PRU) at MUNW currently has a number of important grant
applications being processed in this area.

The big story was in the Sunday Times (August 4th)
This man claims he can defy the laws of gravity and change air travel
forever. So is he barmy or brilliant? It appears that a Russian Scientist,
who works in an institute so secret that it does not even publish its address,
has developed an anti-gravity machine. It also transpires that American
Government and Industrial laboratories have been working in secret on such
projects for fifty years. It is gratifying, when so many military secrets seem
to leak out so quickly, that the really important developments, like Alien
Abduction, Distant Seeing and Anti-gravity, have been kept secure for so long.

It is also stimulating to know that mankind is at last
beginning to throw off the shackles of the old physics. Constraints, such as
Conservation of Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, have held up human
development for too long. I am glad to say that at MUNW we have embraced
post-modern science with full enthusiasm.

The full page article, by <name removed>, describes how the machine, a superconducting
disc rotating in a magnetic field, produces a column of reduced gravity right up
to the ceiling and through the roof. Even the excellent <name removed> does not seem
to realise the full import of the discovery. If you put a flywheel with part of
its rim in the column, it will rotate forever and you have solved the problems
of perpetual motion and free energy at a stroke.

You might be surprised that I give away such a
revolutionary idea so readily. Well, the fact is that such a machine will soon
be made obsolete by new research at the PRU. Our scientists and engineers, also
working at an institution so secret that it does not even publish its address,
have developed a device (the Cyclic Reciprocally Actuated Phlogiston Pump) that
will force Phlogiston up a hill and, as phlogiston has negative mass, this pump
gives out energy rather than absorbs it. It is hoped that a later version
(CRAPP2) will provide sufficient energy to power a large village, as well as
providing a ready source of Phlogiston at the top of the hill to fill air and
space craft that will operate without lifting power.

Of course, there are one or two small problems to iron out,
such as how to extract Phlogiston from the atmosphere, but if the expected
Government grants are forthcoming they will no doubt be solved.

True to the spirit of our late inspiring Vice Chancellor,
MUNW is determined not just to keep this development to itself and is even now
preparing to offer millions of shares in a CRAPP manufacturing company to
ordinary citizens. It is fully expected that the unfortunate events at munw.com
will have no bearing on the success of this issue.

Returning to the horrific future threatened by Global
Warming, the PRU is also at the fore in this field. It has installed a large
special-purpose computer (the Giant Integrator with Gigabaud Operation) to map
the flow of Phlogiston through the atmosphere. A new version is being planned at
this very moment (Super-GIGO), which will match, Government grants willing, any
machine in the Climate Change Industry for the number of cells into which it
divides the Earth’s surface.

Well, thank you for the opportunity to share my views on
the inspiring times in which we live, and I hope it will not be the last.

Where the big liars lurk

Just who do they think they are kidding? The British Met
Office have announced that the first six months of 2002 have been the warmest in
the Northern Hemisphere since records began 143 years ago. Many may choose to
disbelieve this says the Guardian
(too right!). The Times
dutifully slipped it in to the hospital admissions report mentioned above. Number
Watch tries hard not to be yet another Global Warming site; there are
already several splendid scholarly ones in our Links;
but the sheer mendacity of these people outranks anything else, even tobacco.

The announcement was met with hollow laughter among your
bending author’s fellow allotment holders. It is generally agreed the growing
season has been the worst for many a year, because of the continual cold, wet,
dark weather.

Italy
needs more power plants because of the unusually cold winter. Cold weather
wrecked the Ottawa tulip festival. Trout fishing was going on in the snow in
North America. Temperatures in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba dipped an
average of four degrees below normal in the most frigid spring since
record-keeping began in 1948, Environment
Canada reported. In some places, the temperatures dropped even lower.
Edmonton tied with its coldest spring on record — in 1898 — averaging five
degrees colder than normal. Scientist were trapped by ice in the Antarctic.
The New York Times produced a ludicrous story about Alaska burning, which
was flatly denied by the local weather
experts. Then The Times of London lifted the story, without
acknowledgement, and added its own (substantial) exaggeration (They can’t
understand the Celsius/Fahrenheit conversion, which gave us our number of the
month for June, 9/5). The lies about Alaska
alone fair take your breath away, particularly the notorious Nenana
Ice Classic. Yet giant
squid are taking over the world because of global warming. Yet British
“experts make an
announcement: "Globally 2002 is likely to be warmer than 2001, and may
even break the record set in 1998," said Briony Horton, the Meteorological
Office's climate research scientist.” As usual, see John
Daly to find out what is really happening. Thanks, as always, to Miceal
O’Ronain for links, some of which have expired. All the above are, of course,
not reports of climate, but of weather. They, however, are the ones that are not
broadcast, while every little deviation on the warm side is held up as a presage
of the horrors yet to come.

It
must be one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the whole of human history.
International organisations, governments, almost the whole of the media are all
involved in the same big lie. It is not as though it were a forgivable
misconception. They know they are lying, otherwise they would not go to such
lengths to distort the data. They cheat with charts, both by falsifying
the data and calling up all the more subtle elements of chartmanship,
such as the abuse of colour.
So-called academic departments cherry-pick the data sources to find the ones
that support the hypothesis they are paid to propagandize. They will ignore
ninety nine well maintained records in favour of the one that tells the
politically correct story. They call
for anyone who opposes them in the normal manner of scientific debate to be
"ignored and pilloried". This is not science; it is the inquisition.

Meanwhile, what do we do about the poor growth of our
vegetables? Obviously, the solution is to move all our allotments to
the urban heat islands where the “experts” take their temperature
measurements.

Telling it how it is

Amid all the dross of a typical
silly season the Daily Mail came up with two gems on August 12. The first
is an article by Melanie Phillips. Number Watch has previously drawn
attention to this remarkable journalist, who is virtually unique in the British
media in her adherance to the truth (see Feb 2001,
April 2001, Dec
2001 ). Her article It’s wet – but it’s not the end of the world
is a triumphant indictment of the scams surrounding the global warming myth. The
latest is a typical bit of Greenpeace fraud. They published widely before and
after pictures of a retreating glacier. What they did not tell us is that on the
other side of the island (Svalbard in Norway) the glaciers have advanced by more
than a mile in seven years.

The other notable article is by Professor Anthony O’Hear
of Bradford University. He has joined the club of which your bending author has
been a member for two years, the Professorate who have taken early retirement
rather than watch the continuing debauchment of everything they have worked for.
His article Dumbed down degrees carries the sub-heading As outstanding
A level results are predicted, this respected academic tells the truth about the
shameful destruction of our universities – and why he is quitting now. It
is a familiar tale for regular readers of Number Watch.

The school leaving exams (A-level) have now experienced new
record pass levels every year for twenty years. The pupils are of a dreadful
examination treadmill. A bright student will now take 100 examinations in a
typical school career, compared with ten a couple of decades ago and the
qualifications have been rendered virtually worthless by grade inflation. It is,
of course, yet another inheritance from the Thatcher era when everything from
scientific knowledge to human life became a tradable commodity, including
examinations. Even the global warming scam was a Thatcher
invention, as part of her war with the coal miners and the oil sheiks, when
she set up the Hadley Centre, not to do scientific research but to find evidence
for a particular hypothesis, a landmark development. As in so many other cases,
she left an ideal weapon in the hands of left wing zealots.

On the other hand, the Daily Mail also has Susie
Johns’ psychic helpline, which is a quite remarkable collection of grade
one claptrap.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow they
will die

Give the British press their due; they have taken a largely
hostile view of the forthcoming Earth Summit. It is scarcely credible, but no
fewer than 65,000 people are attending this junket. Phrases such as obscene
gravy train trip readily off the hacks’ keyboards. There was a bit of a
kafuffle about the British delegation. All the senior ministers were going,
including Old Two-Jags (Minister for Concreting over Southern England) but they
tried to leave the Minister for the Environment behind. Michael (Nine-homes)
Meacher is the proven master of all the scare-mongering environmental jargon,
but the Government were shamed into taking him along when Greenpeace offered to
pay his expenses. While the delegates are enjoying their slap-up meals, they
will no doubt spare a thought for the African children that are dying of Malaria,
three a minute, because the environmental SIFs have deprived them of DDT, to say
nothing of dengue and all the other terrible diseases that afflict them.

Passing of a true
scholar

(Professor David Barron writes)

Just been reading Edsger Dijkstra's obituary in The
Times. He was really lucky not to be working in the UK and subject to the
tyranny of the Research Assessment Exercise:

Much of Edsger
Dijkstra’s work found its way into his nine books, 40 journal articles
and frequent other formal publications. Many of these are still widely cited, in
a field where technologymoves so
fast as to render many papers obsolete within a short timeof publication.

As I recall, he started
his career in CS shortly before I did. So that's 9 books and 40 journal articles
in just under 50 years. Not much of a productivity record by RAE standards.

Dijkstra’s papers are
characterised by a mathematical elegance andexceptional clarity of
presentation, and their wit and sharp polemical edge make them a pleasure to
read.

Well, that's a matter of personal opinion, but
the real killer is the following observation:

Edsger Wybe
Dijkstra’s penetration is particularly evident in the thousand or more
technical notes, letters and comments — which became known as EWDs —
that have circulated in the computer science community, almost in samizdat form.
They testify to the breadth of his work as well as to its quality. Often these
are illuminated by simple examples, and were handwritten, for preference, using
a fountain pen.

That's the way scientific
communication was conducted, with great success in the CS community, until the
bean counters came in and decided to assess the quality of our work.

Dijkstra was one of a small band of true scholars who took
the inchoate and chaotic subject of computer studies and turned it into a
rigorous science, thereby doing something to reduce the flow of wrong numbers.
Your bending author remembers well trying to tackle the difficult problem of
close-coupled microprocessor systems and finding that Dijkstra had already laid
out all the rules.

While on the subject, David (who was, of course, himself a
member of that honourable band) adds:

I have just heard that Kristen
Nygaard died suddenly on Saturday

Following on Ole-Johan's recent
death, this year's twin recipients of both the IEEE von Neumann prize and ACM
Turing award have died in a terrible short time

I'm sure that I don't need to
remind you of Kristen's work on SmallTalk, which he called SIMULA. And Ole-Johan
[Dahl] will be remembered not least for the classic 'Dijkstra, Hoare and Dahl'
book which laid out the foundations of data structures and structured
programming (as well as his contributions to OO programming via SIMULA).

Still, Maurice Wilkes, Tony
Hoare, Don Knuth and Niklaus Wirth are still with us. But these reports are
making me feel edgy. Reminds me of my days as a young College Fellow in
Cambridge when one of the old Fellows passed on. We would assemble at the
graveside for the interment, and you could see the other old boys sizing each
other up, deciding who was most likely to be the next to go.

Man of the moment

It
certainly makes you proud to be British when a man of the calibre of Michael
(Nine-homes) Meacher is out there representing us before the world. A
representative of that great political tradition that includes the likes of
Grimaldi, Grock and Chaplin, he will be out there at the Johannesburg Junkfest
giving hell to those beastly Americans. Here is just one small extract from an
interview that is proudly presented on
the web by the UK government.

And I have to say I think two things which may influence American opinion
is one that we are seeing natural phenomena which we are all having to explain,
I mean floods in Britain is one we are having to explain, rising sea levels, but
in America quite serious things are happening, certainly stronger hurricanes on
the east coast which are to do with, what is the name of that hurricane that
comes every 2 - 3 years?

INTERVIEWER: They call them different names.

MR MEACHER No, no, there is a name which is the Spanish word for a young child, what
is it called?

INTERVIEWER: El Niño.

MR MEACHERThe El Niño is becoming more frequent and more violent, point one. Point
two, inextinguishable forest fires because dry areas become dryer and the wetter
become wetter and more violent. So in the mid-west inextinguishable forest
fires, melting glaciers, the west now . New York because of the increasing
temperatures, I mean there are a range of phenomena beginning to appear which
Americans may actually put 2 and 2 together …………… .

Now,
regular readers of Number Watch, though they might be able to remember
the name of El Niño, are probably suffering from the delusion that it is an
area of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, not realizing that it is in fact a
hurricane and one of increasing intensity. Furthermore, never having experienced
forest fires and floods before, people must have been worrying about what was
causing them. Now our master of his brief is telling them. America shares the
advantage with Britain of great improvements to their educational systems, so
they will be able to put two and two together, but what answer they come up with
is moot.

And
so we British will stride forward hand in hand into a future of privation and
discomfort, but safe in the knowledge that it is doing us good; for we have the
likes of Nine-homes and Two-Jags to lecture us continually on the evils of
excess consumption, backed up, of course, by New
Labour BBC.

So
those foreigners like John Daly can
bleat all they like about science and stuff, we are British and proud of it.
Anyway, we invented the language, so if our politicians choose to mangle it,
that is our affair.

A fine specimen

Meachv.i. to
indulge publicly in dark fantasies of a horrific future.Meachern one who meaches.

A paragraph from a letter to The Times (August 20th)
by one Kristin Becker (Consultant in clinical genetics),

Global warming is a reality. The ten warmest
years of the century have occurred in the past 15 years. Sea levels are rising,
there are huge forest fires, cities are flooding and the protective ozone layer
is severely depleted. Infectious diseases which at present are largely confined
to countries with warmer climates will spread to other parts of the world, as
will pests threatening crops. The incidence of cancer is rising worldwide,
largely because of environmental factors; genetic factors do not play a major
role.

Footnote:
Reader Paul Oxley points out the following definitions from the Oxford English
Dictionary:

Meach, obsolete from Miche.
Micher, a secret or petty thief; one who skulks about for improper or
dishonest purposes; a truant.

Michery, pilfering, thievishness; cheating.

It’s logic, Jim,
but not as we know it

A small cheer for a Times journalist, Alice
Miles, who has notice the little logical inconsistency in the latest
proposal for a nice little earner, which was to impose fines on people who do
not turn up for GP appointments.

The logical progression goes something like this:

1.People have to wait a long time for GP appointments (sometimes weeks).

2.When they get there on time they still have to wait (sometimes hours).

3.People who don’t turn up cause further delays for others and should
therefore be fined.

Escapism

As the silly season reaches its height your bending author
tends to take refuge in good fiction as an antidote to the bad fiction that
dominates the media. Even reading the classical thrillers, however, evokes
thoughts about the state of the world today.

John le Carré’s The looking glass war is a tale
of the cold war and the goings on in a small intelligence department that has
become something of a backwater. They go round compiling data and making up
files, while saying about each other things like “He’s very good, you
know”. They are sustained by the patronage of ministers and bureaucrats, much
to the irritation of the real professionals. Then they decide to put an agent
into Eastern Germany complete with heavy obsolete radio transceiver. The result
is, of course, a mélange of tragedy and farce.

The thought occurs that this is a very apt parable for the
state of many modern institutions of higher education and research, though
whether they will be obliged to come face to face with reality is another
matter.

What a wonderful treat it was to discover that Bantam books
are producing the Rex Stout library, all the books in the Nero Wolfe detective
series. The doings of the fat genius and his streetwise sidekick, Archie
Goodwin, are one of the best things to come out of American culture and the
stream of familiar characters who pass in and out of the old New York brownstone
are like old friends.

The bad new is that Bantam have thought fit to provide
introductions by contemporary authors. That for Three Witnesses by some
ghastly ronyon is a patronising paean of political correctness. Not only are we
instructed on matters that any half-wit could deduce from the text, such as the
fact that in those days New York telephone exchanges had names, but we get a
lecture on the non-PC nature of the account. It is all there – the evil of
calling women “girls”, the dangers of passive smoking and of cholesterol
etc. Trouble is, you can’t cut the introduction out without spoiling the book.
As a royal personage said in another context , it is like a monstrous carbuncle
on the face of a much loved friend. Even when you try to take refuge in the past
of a glorious culture, THEY are there to spoil it for you.

Number of the month 200,000

This (or possibly 135,000 or any other large number you
care to think of) is the number of immigrants entering Britain every year. Most
of them are illegal. Of the 70,000 asylum seekers last year, three quarters were
denied the right to remain, yet less than 10,000 were returned. 200,000
is also the number of new houses the Government propose to build in the already
overcrowded south east. Something similar is happening in the USA and the rest
of the western world. All the rest of Government policy concerning the future of
the nation (health, transport, education) is mere tinkering at the edges
compared with this, and completely negated by it. Yet the Government, terrified
of being accused of political incorrectness, refuses even to discuss the matter
openly, much as they avoid comment on the tyrant of Zimbabwe or aid to his
British victims. People who try to bring legally bought goods into the country
are subject to illegal seizure, not only of those goods but their cars as well.
Yet, millions of illegal immigrants have been brought in with impunity by
criminal traffickers. Mad or what?